Quotes by Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg won the Nobel Prize for his contributions in combining the weak force and the electromagnetic force to form the electroweak theory. I have read two of his most famous books "Dreams of a Final Theory" on the search for the "holy grail" of physics, the Grand Unified Theory and "The First Three Minutes", a layman's book on the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang and how the universe came to be. Great works I must say.

Unsurprisingly, Weinberg is also a staunch atheist and below are some very interesting quotes from him. Nothing complimentary to religion at all. (Perhaps I should stop posting such blasphemy, my recent string of incredible bad luck might just be a sign that God is showing his displeasure at me. Maybe I overestimate my importance, surely God has better things to do than to take issue with me, He has more important things to do like throwing catastrophic natural disasters in developing countries and spreading AIDS, malaria, hunger and other epidemic in Africa).

"Religious people have grappled for millennia with the theodicy, the problem posed by the existence of suffering in a world that is supposed to be ruled by a good God. They have found ingenious solutions in terms of various supposed divine plans. I will not try to argue with these solutions, much less to add one of my own. Remembrance of the Holocaust leaves me unsympathetic to attempts to justify the ways of God to man. If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.-- "
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

"It's a consequence of the experience of science. As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science -- that it has made it possible for people not to be religious."
-- Steven Weinberg, quoted in Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist," New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

"Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion."
-- Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000

Well, the next is my personal favourite.

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."-- Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000

"The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least."
-- Steven Weinberg, The New York Times, "Physicist Ponders God, Truth and 'a Final Theory'" by James Glanz, January 25, 2000

"It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors? I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. But in fact the perception that God cannot be benevolent is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides make a quite explicit statement that the gods are selfish and cruel, though they expect better behavior from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us to bash the heads of infidels and demands of us that we be willing to sacrifice our children's lives at His orders, and the God of traditional Christianity and Islam damns us for eternity if we do not worship him in the right manner. Is this a nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not supposed to judge God according to human standards, but you see the problem here: If we are not yet convinced of His existence, and are looking for signs of His benevolence, then what other standards can we use?"--
Steven Weinberg, "A Designer Universe?"

Classic argument above. To put things into context, Weinberg is a Jew by race, hence his reference to his relatives been murdered in the Holocaust. The Free Will Argument is often used to explain away the age-old theological contradiction of God being Benevolent and Omnipotent. The contradiction is that if God is Good, why does He allow Evil to happen unless He is not Omnipotent and therefore cannot prevent Evil from happening. However, if God is Omnipotent, then He must not be Benevolent, since He allows so much Evil without stopping it. The Free Will Argument basically says that God is both Omnipotent and Benevolent. He has the power to stop Evil but He does not want to interfere with the Free Will of humans. This of course is a very weak answer.